


Friendship Is A Shared Sort Of Stupidity

by shanibugi



Category: NU'EST
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 11:18:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16428377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shanibugi/pseuds/shanibugi
Summary: He and his friends don’t really fight. Sure, there was that one time Dongho almost killed him with a chokehold, but that didn’t really count. It’s just that sometimes, someone would do something stupid, and the other person would take it too hard. And sometimes, they all would do stupid things at the same time. || Very specific university au, in which Minhyun gets very very stressed.





	1. Tuesday

**Author's Note:**

> I made this Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/ppanjak_ppanjak/status/989682555619196928) last summer and ran with it. The first version of this fic had all the building names and other very specific references, but now I'm editing it so it's easier to understand and relate to. Please let me know if I missed some stuff! (Or idk, if you're from the same university, would you prefer to read the specific version? Because lol that one still exists.)
> 
> Anyway, yeah. This is the first fanfic I have ever written and I am very scared about it but it was a lot of fun to write and I love Nu’est yay.

He didn’t know what he was thinking when he signed up for this. Maybe he thought he was going to be part of some secret organzation where all you had to do was stand and answer questions and look cool. But now, all he could think of was how pressing a problem global warming was, and how we as a society should really be more proactive in solving it for future generations.

Sure, he knew they were required to stand around in the sweltering heat, but this was some next level shit. Minhyun envied the RAs assigned to the offices. Printing out forms in triplicate in an air conditioned room seemed like a dream. Meanwhile, he had to remember to take his salt allergy meds every four hours or he might literally die. At least, his skin would.

“Assignments are random,” Aron said, when Minhyun had brought this up during lunch. His friend was a year his senior and had been an RA the previous semester. He was hoping for a more optimistic answer. “This isn’t a real job where you can get promoted and stuff. The best we can hope for is a decent shot at getting classes that don’t suck.”

Enrollment at the university was a notorious deathmatch for classes. It was like buying concert tickets, only if you missed the concert, you didn’t just miss out on one fun night--you were missing out on your future.

At least that’s how Minhyun saw it. That was the main reason why he applied for the damn job in the first place. RAs get tagged as ‘priority’ in the system, since they’d be too busy helping out to actually enrol themselves.

If he knew it was going to be this hot, he wouldn’t have done it, but he’d had terrible luck in getting his required subjects his entire first year and he was getting desperate. Since the online registration was so terrible, he had to spend hours waiting for new classes to open up. There was that one time that it didn’t and he had to go with the two other people in the campus who needed the credit to beg the professor to let them into a class with the slots already full up. He got the class, but only after a long conversation that had one of the other two almost crying.

He swore he wasn’t going to go through that again, so he’d come up with the idea of becoming an RA and somehow managed to drag most of his friends along with him.

They had agreed to meet up in the Arts and Sciences lobby. It was one of the largest and most recognizable buildings on campus. Almost everyone had a class there at some point, so it was hard to miss. It was a wide space with high ceilings and no chairs, and people often clustered on the floor to study or eat or hang out. He and Aron found a free space near the dean’s office, soaking up the air conditioning every time the door swung open.

It was the first day of enrollment for the first semester, which was usually reserved for freshmen and graduate students, both groups equal parts lost and loud. Minhyun was glad to take a break from answering questions from people who eyed him a little too closely for his liking. He opened his free lunch - the single blessed perk from this madness - fried chicken and lasagna. Interesting combo, but he was too tired and hungry to complain.

“What if there’s a bigger chance of you getting assigned to better places if they know you’ve worked hard?” he said, plunging his fork into a cheesy hunk of lasagna.

“It’s free labor is what it is,” Aron said. He uncapped his water bottle with one hand - a strange habit that no one else he knew could master - took a long, deep pull, and loudly exhaled, sticking his tongue out. Aron clapped him on the back. “We’re under the power of the state, my friend. We just have to accept it.”

There was something about that statement that made the muscles in Minhyun’s neck twitch with anxiety. The thought of letting himself and his future be controlled by the state--a historically untrustworthy entity--curdled his guts. He already had to take two summer classes to make up for the ones he’d missed during the academic year, and it threw him off schedule. He was not going to let himself be derailed any further.

“Your eyes are doing that thing again.”

Jonghyun sat down next to him, wearing his favorite black hoodie. He wore that thing everywhere, and whenever they called him out for wearing it for four days straight, he’d lift it up and say, “But I’m wearing something different underneath.” Like that makes it okay.

“The devil himself is frying us all alive, and you’re still wearing that? Are you not human?” Minhyun said, incredulous. “And what thing with my eyes?”

Jonghyun shrugged. “It’s not that hot.” He had his own unopened paper container resting in his lap. A lidless plastic cup half-filled with blue lemonade was resting on the floor beside him. “Sometimes, your eyes go super narrow and you look like a little baby animal that’s having trouble waking up from six months of hibernation. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. Are you?” Minhyun said, in a way that wasn’t defensive at all, he thought. He didn’t much feel like explaining his unexplainable anxiety over his shapeless future. Instead, he said, “Hyung! Tell him he’s going to die.”

“He doesn’t listen to me,” Aron replied. “Besides, won’t it be nice to have one less person to clean up after?”

“I’m sitting right here,” Jonghyun said, a pleasant smile on his face. Minhyun had known Jonghyun for a long time and that smile had comforted him every time he needed reassurance that everything was going to be all right. But sometimes, everything was not going to be all right, but the smile remained. He didn’t know how he felt about that and it made him narrow his eyes even further.

“He’s right though,” Aron said. He grabbed Jonghyun’s hand in a way that was both firm and solemn, like a doctor about to tell a patient that he only had a month left to live. “You are going to die from this, and we--” He stopped suddenly, tightened his grip on Jonghyun’s hand, and whipped his head to look at Minhyun. “He’s cold!” Aron turned back to Jonghyun with an accusing stare. “Where did you come from? Tell us your secrets!”

“The registrar’s office. Why?” Jonghyun said, placid as ever.

“What! Are you kidding?” Minhyun burst out. “You’ve seriously been hanging out there this entire time while we’ve been drowning in our own sweat?”

“Aren’t the offices air conditioned?”

“We’re not at the offices, you butt! We stand by the giant tarp with the enrollment flowchart and answer stupid questions from freshmen who have no concept of personal space, and who also apparently don’t know how to read. And when the adviser aren’t there, they grumble and complain and whinge like it’s somehow our fault, like I can somehow make new classes magically appear. What am I supposed to say? I had freshman priority once too and I got shining shimmering six sparkling units, you don’t see me complaining, asshats.”

“You shouldn’t be too hard on the freshmen,” Jonghyun said simply. “They don’t yet know the taste of pain.”

Minhyun had run out of breath. All he could do was stare. 

“I’m sorry.” The smile on his face had shrunk somehow, faded into an expression of confusion and genuine sadness. While Minhyun still felt that his anger was totally justified, he suddenly couldn’t look at him.

“When you said, ‘hey let’s be RAs, it’ll look good on our CVs’, I thought you’d applied for the same position as I did so we could all go together.” Jonghyun then explained the entire process of applying for the office spot, how they usually don’t give it to students without much - or in this case, any - experience as an RA, but since he came so highly recommended from all his references, they let him through. He’d been there for the entire two week training period, which did not only include free food and airconditioning but also a modest salary. At the end of his story, he looked almost like a little kid who had been caught picking flowers from someone’s private garden.

Minhyun knew he was supposed to feel bad at this point. Obviously, it was no one’s fault and Jonghyun, at the end of the day, was always just a little boy who wanted to help. But maybe the heat and the weird cheese in his food messed with his brain, because right now, he somehow felt more stressed than he was before. He turned to the next person he could blame.

“What happened to it’s not a real job?” he said to Aron. “We only work for enrollment priority?”

“Hey, this is news to me, too,” he shrugged.

“Is that all you can say? You’re a journalism student. Shouldn’t you be familiar with the news?” Minhyun sighed, then to no one in particular said, “I’m allergic to my own sweat. Let that sink in.”

They ate the rest of their greasy free food in moderate silence, or rather, as silent as it could get in a place where people were constantly and literally running into each other. (They watched three people spill their stuff onto the floor because they’d bumped into something. Two of them just dropped their papers, picked them up easily, and harried off, but one unfortunate soul dropped their dumplings and rice, soy sauce and all.)

The heat seemed more oppressive somehow when no one was talking. And though Aron did his best to lighten the mood by telling the story of how someone mistook him for a professor and he went along with it for about half an hour before the real guy came along, Minhyun could feel something heavier than chicken and lasagna piling up at the center of his stomach with every spoonful he ate.

Eventually, they had to go back to their posts. Jonghyun left with a dimmer version of his usual smile. He didn’t take off his hoodie the entire time they were together. It was tempting to believe that he was doing that to spite them, but Minhyun knew better. Jonghyun felt way too guilty to think of the weather.

“You shouldn’t have gotten mad at him,” Aron said, as they went off to throw away their empty paper containers.

“Because it wasn’t his fault? I know,” he replied, already starting to feel terrible.

“No, because he’s going to sulk for days. Get ready for some random ass presents.”


	2. Wednesday

Aron was not wrong. The next morning, Minhyun opened his dorm room door to a cardboard box that, based on the fading label on its outside, used to contain a computer monitor. However, it was now filled with assorted items that in some distant way or another related to heat relief - a pack of hand towels, small fans (two flimsy and foldable, one battery-powered, all easily bought from sidewalk vendors), a refill of his allergy medicine, sunscreen, sunburn ointment, two gift certificates for a local ice cream store, and strangely, a small basket of fruits - lemons, mangoes, and even a cucumber. There was no note.

It was hard to explain, to say the least.

Thankfully, one benefit of living in the same dorm as all your friends means that little needs to be explained. Your issues usually find their way to everyone in the group one way or another. So he assumed that when he met up with Minki later in the day for some favor he promised weeks ago, he would get out of any awkward questions.

“What is all this?” Minki said. He picked up the cucumber and wagged it at him. “Happy to see me?”

No such luck apparently.

They were standing outside the theater that was inexplicably located in the same building as all the professors’ private offices. Previously, during the times when he went to see one of his professors for consultation, he heard vocalizations at different pitches and the scraping of wood being dragged across cement floors echoing from the inside it like some sort of strange torture chamber. Minhyun could not understand how Minki enjoyed this sort of thing, but his friend had always been the dramatic type.

Minhyun grimaced, grabbed the fruit, and threw it back in the box. “I woke up and it was outside my room. Me and Jonghyun sorta had a...”

“Yeah, I know about your thing with Jonghyun. I yelled at him once for buying Lucky the wrong kind of milk, and he bought like ten cartons of the right kind. Pretty convenient really. I suggest you enjoy it while it lasts. I mean, why do you have it with you?”

“I felt bad,” he said dully. “Anyway, I thought you could give it out to your theater friends. Except those gift certificates. Those are mine.”

Minki had passed on the RA plans because he had to prepare for the new theater season with the university theater group. That had been his excuse for everything since he’d been accepted at the end of their first semester. They’d all let him get away with it since he seemed so happy. There was also the matter of him not being a particularly good actor, a topic they managed to avoid by volunteering to do odd jobs for the current production every time the subject came up. Minki seemed delighted.

“We don’t really need it,” Minki shrugged. “It’s airconditioned inside the practice room.”

“Are you fuc--”

“And besides, I don’t think he’d be happy if you just gave all that away.”

He had a point. “Fine, I’ll keep all of it.” Minhyun sighed and closed the flaps of the box. “So you wanted me to paint some props or move ladders or something?”

“Yeah, change of plans,” Minki said brightly. He disappeared behind the black curtains shrouding the entrance to the theater, then reemerged bearing his own odd collection of items: a plastic crown, a long velvet curtain, and a thick binder.

“Study your own readings, Minki. What’s the point of getting them photocopied early if you’re just going to make me read them anyway?”

“These aren’t my readings. This is a script. You’re reading for the part of Don Juan,“ he concluded, in the same cheery tone.

Minhyun was dumbfounded. “You can’t be serious.”

Minki responded by putting the crown on Minhyun’s head and the curtain - which turned out to be a ratty old cape with a small hole near the hem - around his shoulders, adjusting them to perfection. Minhyun tried to give him a death stare, but he knew there were limits to how threatening he could look in this get-up.

As expected, Minki was unfazed. In fact, his eyes were practically sparkling as he gazed upon his haphazard creation.

“It’s just for today,” Minki said. “Our original guy ate some bad fishballs, and we just need someone to stand in for him just to get the blocking right.”

“You know I’d love to, but I have to go assist some lost freshmen.” Minhyun reached up, took the crown off his head, and handed it to his friend. “Bye.”

He started to head off towards the other end of the hallway but Minki was quicker, immediately sliding on the floor to block his way. Damn him and his aerodynamic frame. “You said you’re only assigned to the morning shift today,” Minki shot at him.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Good thing I took a look at your phone then, my sweet obsessive friend. You’re only conscripted until four. It’s four fifteen. Your schedule’s done for today,” Minki finished smugly.

Little needs to be explained between friends indeed, especially when they know your passcode and your need to calendar everything.

“But I don’t wannaaaaa,” he said, crashing his shoulder into the wall. Minhyun hated the way he sounded. He wanted to blame the heat again for his immature actions, but today he was actually assigned to guide students into offices so he couldn’t in good conscience use that excuse while he leeched off free airconditioning. The truth was he just didn’t feel like embarrassing himself in front of strangers, especially not Minki’s new friends. “You know I can’t act.”

“Come on, please,” Minki pleaded, still standing in his way. “You just have to read it. You don’t have to act-act.”

“I notice you didn’t deny that I can’t act.”

“That’s because you can’t. But we kind of need this done today.”

Minhyun narrowed his eyes, then remembering what Jonghyun said about him looking like a baby animal, decided to fold his arms in an effort to make himself look more imposing. Minki’s face changed then. The top half of his face went completely dead, and his lips took on the slightest of sneers, like some snooty British villain. Minki had been playing this game for years and Minhyun should have known that he was going to lose.

“Do it or I’ll tell your sister you threw up in her car.”

Minhyun decided surrending was his best bet. If there was one person he didn’t want to deal with right now, it was his sister, who arguably was the only person better at blackmail than Minki. That’s why they were such close friends. Grumbling, he took the crown from his friend’s hands and put it back on his head.

“Thank you!” he called sweetly, before relaxing his face into its normal, fresh and unaffected form. 

Minki led the way into the theater practice room, while Minhyun grumbled behind him. It much larger on the inside than what he expected, with high ceilings and steel bleachers painted entirely black. There were large blocks - also black - strewn all around the room upon which buckets of paint, long unvarnished sheets of wood, half-empty glue bottles, and other paraphernalia rested. In a corner was a pile of bags stacked on top of one another: long duffel bags stuffed with clothes and costumes, unzipped backpacks with snacks peeking out, paper bags and totes overflowing with more raw materials waiting to be shaped into backdrops and props.

Minhyun was unsure what type of play they were putting on. A group painting the finishing touches on a flatboard tower and his makeshift costume made him think it was some sort of fairytale adaptation, but that didn’t explain the group in the corner dismantling an old Christmas tree. Still another cluster was busy layering wet strips of tissue paper on some poor schmuck‘s face. He began to think that maybe being an impromptu understudy wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

He barely had time to register this however, before Minki shoved the binder he mistook for readings under his nose, returned the crown and cape to his head and shoulders, and pushed him into place atop a masking tape cross. “Page thirty-six. Start at ‘Have you seen my sword?’ You’ll be fine,” he whispered, then promptly turned around.

Minhyun managed to grab his arm before he got away. “Where are you going?”

“I have to get Dongho. He promised to help paint backdrops.”

“I could have done that!”

“Do you really think we can trust Dongho to act? I picked you for a reason, and not just because I didn’t have a choice.” Minki gave him a bright smile and a thumbs up. Then he left.

Minhyun looked around him, and he swore about twenty pairs of eyes looked in a different direction. So that’s how it’s going to be. He could feel yesterday’s lunch churning in the pit of his stomach again.

“Places!” A small thin woman with bags under her eyes, hair gathered in an untidy knot, and a clipboard wider than her head called in a voice much too deep for her stature. He couldn’t tell whether she was a student or a teacher. Suddenly, her owl eyes zeroed in on him and he understood why she was in charge. “Look alive, stand-in.”

He wished he could. He sure didn’t feel like it.


	3. Thursday

Minhyun eyed the couple sitting a table across from him. He had never been particularly sensitive to PDA, but if people wanted to do it, maybe they shouldn’t have chosen a table where literally everyone could see them. He watched as the girl fed another spoonful of ice cream to her boyfriend, who had his arm around her. Well, they’re never going to finish eating that way, he thought.

He was sitting in the newly opened ice cream shop near campus. Like a lot of establishments in the area, it was a tiny place, wedged in between a breakfast-themed restaurant and a pizza place, but also like any other newly-opened shop, it was already packed with people. Which made sense, especially since there was a person outside distributing gift certificates like the kind Jonghyun had given him in his ‘I’m sorry’ box. There were only two gift certificates though, both of which expired within the week. Minhyun didn’t really feel much like choosing which of his friends he was least annoyed at to come with him. That left only one person.

“You’re doing your hibernating animal thing again,” Sujin asked, dropping a cup of mint chocolate in front of him before sliding into the seat opposite.

“Why does everyone say that?” He plunged a pink plastic spoon into his ice cream. It stuck like a shovel in wet sand.

“It’s your face. You really should do something about that.”

He stopped himself from pointing out that they looked the same since they were related. On the one hand, he was thankful that he didn’t have to stare at the couple now that Sujin was blocking the view, but on the other hand - ugh Sujin. He loved his sister. Really. And she would never ask him about his life; that was why he invited her in the first place.

No, she’d be way too busy talking about hers.

“By the way, do you think you can get me a slot in Ms. Lee’s class? You know, with your RA powers? I need to get my next elective this semester to be on schedule, but then again, I could take it any time within the year. I don’t really mind, except Annie and the rest have already taken it. Ellie and I are basically the only ones who haven’t. Ellie’s great and all, but she’s been terrible at showing up to class ever since she started dating - Kevin? Karl? I’m not sure, whoever. Anyway, I don’t really want to babysit her again, so instead of going to Mr. Song’s class - where everyone’s going of course, easy A - I’m actually trying to get into Ms. Lee’s class. But don’t tell her. Ellie. Not Ma’am Lee. Then again, I could choose a different elective...”

Minhyun kept digging his spoon into his ice cream and pulling it back out until it looked less like a smooth scoop and more like something that came from the back of a dumptruck.

“Are you even listening?” he heard his sister say from somewhere far away.

“No,” he replied. He tore his eyes away from the paper cup and stared at her. Sujin was only a year older than him, but she’d always acted like she knew how to do everything, and ever since she’d gotten into college, her strategy of pretending like she was too cool to be stressed seemed to be pretty effective. It was a desperate move, but he thought maybe he could learn something from her.

“How’d you do it?” he asked. “This whole college thing.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “It’s not that hard. Don’t tell me you’re already stressed? The semester hasn’t even started yet.”

“I know,” he began defensively. “It’s just...I don’t know. The past few days have been weird.”

“It’s college. Everything’s weird. You just have to get used to it.”

A beat passed. It was often to her credit that Sujin never sugarcoated things, so it surprised him a little to hear her tone soften slightly before she continued. “Look, whatever it is, it’s going to be fine. Just chill and go with the flow.”

But he wasn’t like that. He hadn’t ever been like that. He had always been the type of person who cleaned up messes - both literal and figurative - before they even happened. To have so many tiny messes happen one after the other, added to his everpresent worry of not graduating on time, was unnerving. He kept poking his spoon into his ice cream until a small hole had formed.

“Stop attacking your ice cream. It didn’t do anything to you.” She reached over, scraped some mint chocolate off of his scoop with her spoon, and put it in her mouth. She chewed while he looked out the window, trying to distract himself from the couple who probably thought no one could see what their hands were doing under the table.

“Did you invite me here because you wanted to have a heart to heart talk? Did you want to get something off your chest or whatever?” - a brief memory of him throwing up all over the backseat of her car last year after his graduation party flashed in his mind - “Because you know I’m not good at this. You should have asked one of your friends from high school. Aren’t you all still close?”

“They’re kind of the reason why everything’s been weird,” he mumbled.

His sister made the kind of face she usually reserved for stray puppies. “Aww, did you fight?”

He didn’t want to dignify her with a response, but now that he was thinking about it, he and his friends don’t really fight. There’s never any yelling or hard feelings or physical violence. Sure, there was that one time Dongho almost killed him with a chokehold, but that didn’t really count. It’s just that sometimes, someone would do something stupid, and the other person would take it too hard. And sometimes, they all would do stupid things at the same time.

“You’re all so cute,” Sujin cooed, clearly glad that the conversation had taken a lighter tone. “You should make up with your friends, Minnie. So much shit goes down in college. You’ll be happy to have people to suffer with.”

“What, like your friend Ellie?”

“And here I thought you weren’t listening.” She smiled at him, one of her classic grins that exponentially increased her smugness. “I get it though. Sometimes you just drift apart. Can’t really be helped.” She shrugged and continued eating her ice cream, which he noticed was now a melted pool of caramel peanut butter.

Something about that didn’t sit well with him. He thought about all the shit they’d been through since high school. He was a freshman when they’d met, with a terrible haircut and unflattering glasses that photographed badly in any angle. Still, the four of them had stuck it out with him. They’d grown out of their emo phases together, got better clothes, and went through the grueling process of becoming freshmen again.

It was annoying to admit, but Sujin was right. He needed his stupid friends. It was difficult to imagine going through the shit of his life without them.

He was already planning of making his own I’m sorry box, when he recognized Aron walking away from the counter with a large cone of strawberry ice cream. Minhyun decided Aron was currently the person in his group he felt least offended by so there was no harm in waving at him. (Dongho had technically done nothing wrong, but he was implicit in Minki’s evil plan so that bumped him lower on his list.)

Aron squeezed between a couple holding hands - why where there so many of them today? - and made his way to their table. “Hey, I didn’t know you were planning to check this place out. You should’ve told me.”

“Uh, yeah. Sorry. I guess it slipped my mind,” he said, before gesturing vaguely at his sister. “You’re familiar with the swamp creature--ow!” Sujin’s hand had darted out and pinched his arm. He was used to her bullying but it was always a little extra annoying when she did it in front of other people.

Aron looked at them with a small smirk of amusement, and Minhyun found himself thinking one of those weird paranoid thoughts he usually did a good job of ignoring. Aron and Sujin were in the same year, and a small yet persistent voice at the back of Minhyun’s brain kept saying that they were secretly hanging out without him. He knew there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with this, which was why it frustrated him so much that he felt so weird about thinking it at all. And it would get worse when, sometimes, he would ride this train of thought to some really uncomfortable places.

He never told anyone about this because he knew it was nothing. They usually wouldn’t even speak to each other when there were other people to talk to. It was stupid. He was being stupid.

“Hi,” Sujin said with the smile she used whenever she was trying to get their parents to agree to something they wouldn’t normally agree to.

“Hi,” Aron replied with an equally bright smile. Minhyun felt like someone had snuck a spider into his shirt.

A strange moment of silence hovered in the air before Sujin abruptly stood up. “I have to go to the bathroom. You can sit here,” she said to Aron before heading off. 

“Since when were you two friends?” The words spilled out of his mouth before Aron’s butt had even touched the seat.

“What do you mean?”

“You seem close.” He tried very hard not to sound accusatory.

“Well, I’ve known her as long as I’ve known you.”

“Yeah, and we’re close, right?”

“Yes?” Aron asked, clearly confused. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Minhyun knew he was being irrational and sensitive. It was literally nothing and he should probably get off the tracks if he didn’t want to be crushed by this train of thought again - he knew all this. But the past few days had done a good job of making him feel like he knew absolutely nothing.

Sujin reappeared beside their table. “Line was too long,” she explained with a shrug.

Aron was about to give her back her seat, but she shook her head. “I’ll just wait for them to finish,” she said, with a stiffness in her voice. They followed her gaze towards the couple Minhyun had noticed earlier. They looked like they’d been done with whatever they’d been doing and seemed to be taking their sweet time getting ready to leave. Sujin stared at them like she was getting ready to throw a bomb in their direction.

Although he shared his sister’s emotions, he thought she actually looked less threatening than usual with her eyes narrowed like that, less like the older sister who made a senior cry (“Maybe you could work on making good music and then someone else will like you.” She was trying to let him down easy) and more like an old lady who constantly yelled at kids to get off her lawn.

“Hey, you do that thing Minhyun does with his eyes, too,” Aron suddenly said. Both of them snapped their heads to look at him. He was grinning.

“Ew, really?” Sujin seemed legitimately alarmed at this and Minhyun couldn’t help but feel a little offended.

He suddenly felt like the world was moving at a different speed. He knew nothing had changed. They were still in the ice cream shop, there were dozens of people around them, the couple was still gross - he knew all this. But it didn’t stop the next few moments from happening. It was as if Aron was speaking in slow motion, each word like a curse more terrible than the last.

“No, it’s cute.”

The spider that had crawled down his back earlier had grown tentacles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hwang Sujin is my bias.


	4. Friday

There was something about the Engineering building that creeped Minhyun out. It stood on the exact opposite side of the campus from the friendly, all-welcoming Arts and Sciences building, but housed completely different people, like a sinister mirror in a fairytale. The last time he was there, it was the day of the university entrance exam and he was so nervous he almost ran out of the room in the middle of the Math part. He heard there was an elevator inside and two libraries while the other buildings barely got enough chairs. To him, that screamed ‘evil science laboratory’ more than anything.

But since one of his friends had decided to become an evil scientist, he found himself waiting on its front steps more often than he wanted to. He’d usually have a stick of whatever street food was nearby or Dongho would share whatever snack he had on him, but today he was feeling too antsy to eat.

He’d hardly gotten any sleep the night before because he kept having unsettling dreams that made him feel even more unsettled because they shouldn’t have been unsettling at all. In them, his sister was getting married and everything was perfect. Except it wasn’t and no one seemed to notice except him. His suit was a size too big, there was a glaring typo in the invitations, and every flower vase was a few centimeters off center. Minhyun shuddered just thinking about it.

He rubbed his eyes and looked up. It was one of those fluke-y days where after days of burning, skin-shattering sunlight, the sky looked like it was ready to let go of a few tons of rain for a few hours. Then the earth would heat up again and it would be gross and uncomfortable like it always was.

“You look grumpy.”

Dongho appeared next to him, holding out a piece of twisted, sugared bread wrapped in plastic. He’d probably bought it off the hunchbacked old lady that walked around the campus carrying her wares on her back. At this rate, Dongho and that old lady had probably spent more time together than he and Minhyun had all summer. Dongho had spent the last two months in the province with his parents and had just returned the other day. Today was the last official day for enrollment and he was trying to get everything done on time.

Minhyun shook his head no. His stomach felt weird again. “Did you get everything done?” he asked, standing up.

“Yup, just need to pay,” Dongho replied. He unwrapped the pastry as they walked down the steps. The campus was usually more crowded at this hour with people getting off class and loitering around kiosks and food stalls, but the prospect of rain must have scared everyone away. There was no one on the road except a few persistent joggers.

They reached the nearest waiting shed. The school was so big it needed its own transportation system, with buses following routes that went around campus and the nearby neighborhoods and city centers. Minhyun slowed his pace and moved to stand near the edge of the sidewalk, but Dongho kept walking. “Save your money. Let’s walk.”

He was right of course. It was more practical to walk since every bus that passed by this stop was going in the other direction. They’d have to round the entire campus before getting to where they needed to go. But Minhyun didn’t really feel like walking today. He didn’t know if it was the lack of sleep or just random laziness, but he felt like his legs were about to give out at any minute.

“Wouldn’t it be faster if we took a bus?” he said, even if he knew it wasn’t.

Dongho, already a few feet away, turned around and looked at him like he had suggested they eat a worm. “No,” he said plainly and kept walking.

Minhyun watched Dongho walk away - his white hoodie and his heavy sneakers moving farther and farther away, while he was left there, standing still. The road was still empty. Even the joggers he’d seen earlier had passed them by and were probably on the other side of the oval by now. Thunder rumbled above them.

“It’s going to rain,” Minhyun called.

“It won’t,” Dongho called back, keeping the same pace.

Minhyun wanted to walk. He really did. But he couldn’t. So he tried again.

“The cashier is going to close before we get there!”

“It won’t!”

It seemed to take Dongho a few more moments before realizing that no one was following him. Minhyun watched him walk back to the waiting shed, the half-eaten pastry still in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Dongho asked. 

Minhyun looked at his friend. Dongho’s head was cocked to one side, and the look on his face was one of genuine concern. He could only imagine what he looked like right then, mostly because he hadn’t had the chance to look in a mirror all day. Bloodshot eyes. Red patches on his arms that hadn’t quite faded. Sweat spots on his shirt from standing all day.

“I’m tired,” was all he could think to say.

Saying it out loud made him feel both relieved and stupidly pathetic. He wanted to lie on the ground and sleep until his four years in this place were over. And if the earth opened up beneath him, he probably would’ve cried and said thank you. He knew he was being dramatic, and maybe someone else would’ve reacted in a less neurotic way, but he felt like shit, damn it, and he was ready to fight anyone who got in the way between him and the next fucking bus that passed by. He mentally braced himself for the possibility of another headlock.

But Dongho just shrugged, the expression on his face halfway between a wince and a smile, and said, “I heard.”

Minhyun unclenched his fists. He didn’t realized he’d clenched them in the first place. “What do you mean?”

“We live in the same house. Our friends told me,” he said, like it was obvious. Because it was. “They said you’ve been really stressed.”

“Yeah, because of them!” Minhyun was glad no one was around to hear him yell.

“The RA thing? Hasn’t Jonghyun given you his I’m sorry box yet? I told him to give you both the pills and the ointment.”

Minhyun paused. “Wait, what? What do you mean you told him?”

“He kept texting us about what he should give you to say sorry. You know what he’s like. He talks to himself if no one replies and it spams the group chat. I almost muted it, but I felt sorry for him so we all pitched ideas and stuff. He bought everything himself though.”

“But our group chat wasn't spammed. Wait, do you have a group chat without me?”

“I didn’t say that. Anyway, he works too hard.” Dongho leaned on the short cement wall near the back of the waiting shed, clearly bracing himself for what was shaping up to be a long conversation. “That’s probably why he got the job in the first place. He gets shit done.”

Leftover strings of guilt tickled at Minhyun’s insides. He’d already forgiven Jonghyun for not telling him about the job. He wasn’t even really that mad about it in the first place. But over the past few days, he’d just felt worse every time he thought about how he didn’t even congratulate Jonghyun for doing well, when he was the first person who’d agreed when he proposed the RA idea in the first place.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Dongho said, seeing the look on his face. “He just wants you to talk to him again. Give him some snacks the next time you catch him playing video games. Everything will be back to normal.”

Leave it to Dongho to leave everything to food. Still, Minhyun couldn’t stop his heart from feeling significantly lighter when he heard that Jonghyun still wanted to talk to him. And if he was being honest, maybe he missed Jonghyun a little bit, too. He still couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud though. So instead, he switched tracks.

“It’s not just that,” he mumbled. “Minki ambushed me with that theater thing and I didn’t know what to do. That stage manager lady looked like she was going to throw her clipboard at my head every time I said a line.”

”Hey, I saw you out there,” Dongho began. “You were...Um. Well, you were something.”

“Wow. For a second there, I thought you were going to say something nice,” Minhyun deadpanned. Then he narrowed his eyes. “You were there! Why couldn’t you have done it?”

Dongho held his hands up in surrender. “Minki just told me to paint sets in the back. I didn’t know it was d-day for his evil plan.”

“Which evil plan? There are many.”

“The one where he shows us off to his theater friends. According to him, they think we’re ‘cute’ for some reason.” Minhyun probably would’ve thought the cute thing was just an excuse for Minki to drag them into his theater things, but then Dongho did air quotes near his ears and he mentally conceded.

“He’s been collecting evidence for a while now,” Dongho continued. “Do you know he shows them your photos and plays clips of you singing during our senior production? It’s a little creepy.”

Minhyun privately thought it was actually kind of sweet. He’d spent his entire life having an older sister with a strong personality, and though he knew his parents loved them both, sometimes he felt like he had to try a little harder to be noticed. It was nice to think that someone did.

“Why did he make me act though? We all know I suck. I mean, he’s worse but I’m probably a close second.”

“He says he’s been selling you too hard and he should probably break the illusion while there’s still time. Also, I kind of ripped the costume,” Dongho added. “That’s why it has that hole near the end.”

“Ooh, you’re going to pay for that. Watch over your fish.”

“Those fish are fighters,” Dongho said seriously. “And anyway, I saw Minki measuring hyung’s shoulders during breakfast the other day. He’s probably up next.”

“Tell Minki he’s taken,” Minhyun muttered bitterly, then regretted it the instant the words were out of his mouth. A roll of thunder rumbled.

“By who?” Dongho asked. 

“No one,” he said quickly. It wasn’t something he wanted to think of, much less talk about. He prayed desperately for this to be painless, but as he watched realizaton spread on his friend’s face, he knew the heavens were not on his side.

“Does hyung have a girlfriend?” Dongho asked, his eyes wide with urgency and confusion. “Since when? Who is she? Is she okay?” 

“It’s no one, okay? It’s just my sister.”

“Sujin-noona is--”

“Hey, don’t you have to pay your tuition?” Minhyun said loudly, before pushing off the wall and walking in the direction of the cashier. The moment he was out of the shadow of the waiting shed, he felt raindrops hit the top of his head. He risked another few steps only to have the sky unleash what must have been at least a week’s worth of rain. He walked back with damp hair and a dead look in his eyes.

Dongho was still confused. “Look, the Jonghyun and Minki things I understood, but where did you even get the idea for this one?”

He sighed. “You know what? I don’t know either. It’s just weird seeing them together. I know I shouldn’t think it, but I can’t help it. Thinking about how they’re hanging out without me makes me feel like insects are crawling down my neck. It’s so weird I can’t even talk about it.” A shiver he couldn’t suppress went through him and he winced.

“Okay, crazycakes, calm down,” Dongho said slowly. “First of all, maybe you need some sleep.” It was like he was talking to a small but volatile animal, and Minhyun didn’t blame him one bit.

“Look, I don’t know how to tell you this, but they’ve kind of been together this entire time,” Dongho said, still talking slowly. “I mean, they were both freshmen when the rest of us hadn’t graduated yet. They probably didn’t know anyone but each other since so few people from our high school ended up going here.”

“You’re not making this any better.”

“All I’m saying is, what’s so bad about them being friends? Don’t you want someone to take care of your sister? And real talk, Sujin-noona would be pretty great at keeping Aron-hyung from doing something stupid, like crashing a frat party--”

“Or pretending to be a professor.”

“Or farting on air during his radio show.”

“Or turning in a paper with ‘3Handsome5U’ in place of his name.”

“Or bringing a stray dog home.” 

“My sister really likes dogs actually, but yeah, I get your point.”

And he did. He still felt weird, and he would probably feel weird for a really long time, but thinking about it in terms of inevitability and practicality made it easier to bear. They had no one else, so they talked to each other. Easy enough to stomach as long as he didn’t think about any of the other stuff.

“And anyway, even if they did end up--” Dongho began.

Minhyun shot him a look so sharp it cut him off mid-sentence. Maybe he was a little bit like his sister after all. 

The rain stopped just as abruptly as it began. “Hey.” Dongho looked at him sincerely, and again Minhyun felt deeply conscious about the grossness of his day-old clothes. “You need to give yourself a break.”

“I know,” he said dejectedly. He opened his mouth with the intention to sigh but ended up letting out a huge yawn. He retreated until his back found the nearest pole to rest on, and without his control or permission, he found himself slowly sinking down to the cement floor. He never thought he’d be the type to do this but college had shown him that anyone can do anything if they’re desperate enough.

“I didn’t mean here,” Dongho said.

“I’ve been stupid,” Minhyun said bluntly, suddenly finding the cracks in the cement deeply fascinating.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” was the quick reply. A beat passed and his friend continued in a softer tone, “That’s okay. It’s not like you’re the only one. You’ve spent six years with some real weirdos. Aren’t you used to it yet?”

Six years, he thought. That was a long time. Maybe it really was an otherworldly feat to have spent that much time with the same unpredctable, equally crazy people. But there wasn’t a second of it that he would trade for anything. Not for enrollment priority, not for all the free ice cream in the world. People who not only forgave you for doing something stupid, but who go one step further to be stupid with you, he decided, were irreplaceable. Even if it ended with a meltdown in some gross waiting shed.

Dongho looked down at him sympathetically.

“You know, I’d love to take you home,” he began. “But I need to get this done today and your drama cost us about ten minutes.”

In those ten minutes, Dongho said something that he couldn’t get out of his head. They could take care of each other. To have someone take care of you - that was a nice thought.

He let himself be pulled up by the wrists. The tail ends of his shirt dripped with rainwater and dirt. A part of him shriveled at the thought of having to get those stains out later, but the rest of him was grateful that someone was there to drag him upwards when he felt like the ground had pretty much eaten him alive.

“You ready to go now?”

“You want to skip it and get some takeout? No one’s graduating on time anyway.”

“Chill Minhyun sounds promising, but this isn’t the time to let him out. I really have to finish this. Let’s just run.”

Another rumble of thunder sounded overhead, but the sun cautiously shone a clear light. Minhyun could smell the damp coming from the trees and the grass from the earlier rain shower. He couldn’t blame the weather for being so temperamental. It had been a long week.

Dongho had already ran ahead and was a full block away but it didn’t matter. Minhyun knew he wasn’t going to be left behind. He took a breath and ran after his friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lol, can you tell I don't get to the end of things very often? This was a weirdly paced story with a pretty cheesy ending, but it's the first full thing I've written in years. Just the fact that it _has_ an ending makes me happy.
> 
> If you got this far, thank you so much for reading!! May you see your bias and I hope they tell you good things and give you strength and love for the rest of your days. ^^


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